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Mobile Syrup has a pretty big scoop this morning: they've been able to confirm that Freedom Mobile will start carrying the iPhone in-store as of December 8th. And not cast-off refurbished hardware, either—the carrier will offer new stock and the full complement of 2017's iPhone 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X.

In Western Canada there will be even more Apple product to choose from; because FM is already running their 2500MHz spectrum in that part of the country the iPhone 6, 6s, 6s Plus, SE, 7 and 7 Plus will be available on the same date. Those same devices will be available in Eastern Canada once that spectrum gets lit up in early 2018.

Canadians who finance their smartphone purchases (ie. most of us) stand to reap some considerable savings over 24 months, as all iPhones will be $0 down. Check the link below for details on that.

It will be interesting to see what Apple's iconic smartphone can do for Freedom's subscriber numbers and, if there ends up being a big influx of new users, whether or not FM's young LTE network can handle it.

Yup, it's true... Germany's telecommunications regulator has ruled that smartwatches for kids fall under the category of unauthorized transmitters. Sales of new devices—even over the Internet—are now illegal, and the regulator is urging parents to destroy existing equipment.

Germany is a country that apparently takes user privacy very seriously, and its government seems especially vigilant when it comes to children. Only a few months ago the same regulator issued a similar ban on an Internet-connected talking doll that listens to its owner and responds in real time. That smart toy was deemed to be a surveillance device.

Similar issues are present in child-friendly connected watches. The problems are twofold: first, the SIM card in these watches allows parents to listen in on their child in class (for example), violating the privacy of everyone present in the classroom—including the kid wearing the watch! Also, and perhaps because these products can be construed as toys, they are insecure enough to be at risk from third-party attackers.

That for me is the most interesting aspect of this story. Nearly every security expert I come across warns about the dangers of an unsecured Internet of things. Hopefully the people who make these smart toys and other connected devices will get their act together and step up the security of their products.

Android Police has just done another of their famous APK teardowns, this one for a new version of Google's official SMS app, Messages. This new version (2.7) not only has more streamlined code—the size of the apk itself is down 30% from the version before it—but some new features as well, including new message indicators, calling integration with Google Duo and RCS support for dual-SIM phones.

You'll recall that the Rich Communications Services (RCS) protocol is a joint venture by carriers, Google and the GSMA to bring text messaging into the 21st century. Think of it like iMessage, but for everyone. The code in Messages 2.7 shows support for standard RCS features such as sending messages over WiFi and the ability to see your friends type replies, but also suggests that users will be able to toggle RCS support for separate SIM cards if they have them.

If you live in Asia, India or even parts of Europe there's a very good chance that you're using a dual-SIM phone; the only reason why they're so scarce in North America is that carriers here have a vested interest in not selling you one. Cheap calls on one SIM and a cheap data plan meant for tablets on the other? Yeah, not so much...

For me it has become a must-have feature, and I had to dump Google's default messaging client for third party solutions (first Textra, then Pulse) because those apps support two SIMs. With this new update I might have to give Messages another look.

I caught the end of the livestreamed OnePlus 5T launch event yesterday, and for me the best thing about it had nothing to do with the phone itself. What set my geek heart all aflutter was when OnePlus co-founder (and Steve Jobs wannabe) Carl Pei took to the stage to announce that all ticket sales from the event were being donated to F-Droid, the open source app store for Android.

Tickets for the launch were priced at $40 USD but it's not clear how many tickets were actually sold, as there were a lot of tech bloggers and YouTubers there who I'm guessing didn't pay. But honestly, it doesn't even matter; at the very least the project got some free press. Here, as a reminder, is but a sample of what F-Droid has to offer:

FOSS software and the Android modding community are equally important to OnePlus. You'll recall that 2013's OnePlus One shipped with the first commercial version of CyanogenMod; the latter ended up going nowhere but the former is thriving, thanks in this part of the world to its sizable geek cred. Most of the Linux podcasters I listen to own a OnePlus device, and these people are unabashed freedom beards who would never even go near a Galaxy or Pixel.

As a company OnePlus is certainly guilty of sometimes lazy, sometimes shady practices, but they do serve their community well. And it's great to see them giving back, even if it's ultimately a token gesture.

The graph above can be found in a tweet from the analytics company tefficient, and bares a little explaining. The vertical axis plots the amount of mobile data used per human per month in various countries. You can clearly see that mobile users in Finland and Taiwan used large amounts of data in 2016. The horizontal axis measures carrier revenue per gigabyte. You'll notice that Canada is quite literally off the charts. What does this mean? It means that Canadian carriers are making a lot of money providing not a lot of data to their customers.

You want numbers? Dr. Michael Geist has numbers. A recently-published CRTC report has cited that of the carriers who charge data overage fees (ie. not Freedom Mobile) 6% of those revenues come from overages. Given that wireless revenues in 2016 exceeded $23 billion CAD, revenue from data overages alone accounted for more than a billion dollars that same year. There's clearly little incentive for carriers in this country to reign in data overage charges; in fact, the opposite seems to be happening—according to the CBC data overage rates have increased by as much as 40% this year.

More bad news for OnePlus... on the eve of a new product announcement they've been accused of backdooring their devices, allowing an attacker with physical access to gain root access without having to unlock any bootloaders— which we all know would wipe any and all sensitive data from your phone, right? Anyone? Bueller...?

The "backdoor" here is actually a Qualcomm testing app called EngineerMode. With the correct password (which has already been reverse-engineered) it will indeed grant root access via the Android Debug Bridge (ADB). What it won't do is allow malicious software with root privileges to be installed on your device. In fact, XDA has put their own spin on this vulnerability, citing it as a great new way for modders to root their OnePlus device.

OnePlus absolutely should have removed this app before shipping out hardware to their customers. As to why they didn't, signs point to laziness rather than something more nefarious. Oh, and by the way, some ASUS and Xiaomi phones were also sold with the same Qualcomm testing app on board.

Service Core (GmsCore) is a library app, providing the functionality required to run apps that use Google Play Services or Google Maps Android API (v2).

Services Framework Proxy (GsfProxy) is a small helper utility to allow apps developed for Google Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM) to use the compatible Google Cloud Messaging service included with GmsCore.

Unified Network Location Provider (UnifiedNlp) is a library that provides WiFi and cell-tower-based geo-location to applications that use Google’s network location provider. It is included in GmsCore but can also run independently on most Android systems.

Maps API (mapsv1) is a system library, providing the same functionality as now deprecated Google Maps API (v1).

Store (Phonesky) is a front-end application providing access to the Google Play Store to download and update applications. Development is in early stages and there is no usable application yet.

If an open source interface for Google's app store seems somewhat contradictory, consider the promising YouTube replacement NewPipe, which offers access to the same videos but removes the annoying pre-roll ads.

With their completely unnecessary vendor image Google has already ruined their phone hardware for me; should the day ever come for me to wean myself off of Gmail and the like my fallback position would most likely be the F-Droid app store and an Android custom ROM. I've never actually tried it, though, and I honestly hadn't considered just how deeply integrated Google Mobile Services were in a typical Android device.

It's not due for its official unveiling until this Thursday, but here's an early peek at the 5-month refresh of the OnePlus 5, the OnePlus 5T. That's it on the left. The photo is from a gallery published by ZDNet's German office, since taken down. Here's their explanation, with a little help from Google Translate:

ZDNet.de received a review sample of the OnePlus 5T without being asked. It contained no cover letter—only a review guide was included in the shipment. The editors had no knowledge of an embargo date. An NDA was not agreed in writing or orally.

Late Friday evening two e-mails reached the editorial office with the request to take the article offline, asking for reporting on the OnePlus 5T from November 17th only. The editors have decided to meet this request.

So ZDNet's gallery is gone, but savvy tech blogs have already saved copies of the photos and re-hosted them—like Android Police, for example.

The big news about the new phone is its new 18:9 screen, 1080 x 2160 pixels @ 401 ppi. Thanks to much smaller bezels (and a fingerprint sensor moved to the back of the device) the display fits into a shell only slightly taller than the current OnePlus 5. Everything else about the 5T seems to be the same; it's got the same Snapdragon 835 processor, the same 6 or 8 GB of RAM / 64 or 128 GB of storage, the same headphone jack... And unfortunately the review units are still shipping with Android 7.1.1 Nougat rather than Oreo.

Thankfully, the price of the new model is also expected to stay in the range of the current OnePlus 5, which in this age of ultra-premium flagships can only be a good thing.

To honour the 10th anniversary of the smartphone that changed everything, I forced myself to read the entirety of Brian Merchant's The One Device. It's definitely meant for Apple fans, and seems at times to be set in a fictitious world where Android doesn't even exist.

To be fair, one of the chapters where Android is actually acknowledged turned out to be the most illuminating one, at least for me. The author visits the infamous Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where a surprisingly candid employee had this to say about the local job market:

“I was tricked to work for Foxconn,” a new recruit says. “I intended to work for Huawei,” he adds, referring to the Chinese smartphone competitor. “People feel way better working for Huawei, better corporate culture, more comfortable.” In fact, he says, “Everyone has the idea of working in Foxconn for one year and getting out of the factory and going to work for Huawei.”

So congratulations to any Huawei owners reading this; you can rest easy with the knowledge that the people who built your device were treated well while making it. And if you were wondering about that other big smartphone OEM, later in the same chapter a Foxconn higher-up had this to say:

“I had a meeting with Samsung executives and they said they would just follow Apple [...] That’s what they told us—they would do whatever Apple did.”

So what exactly does Apple do? If you're not familiar with Cupertino's decidedly hands-off approach to manufacturing, check out my Christmas Downer post from 2014.

Though I will fight for the smartphone audio jack with my last dying breath I am also, somewhat paradoxically, a fan of wireless earbuds. I try to get in about four to five hours of podcast listening per week, and usually do so on a morning or afternoon walk. Wired earbuds serve this purpose fairly well, except for the cord that either gets tangled as I pull out my phone to skip through an ad, or gets caught on some random object as I walk by it. So-called "neckbuds", a set earbuds connected by a cable that goes around the back of one's head, are only slightly better; the cable has an annoying habit of snagging on my shirt or jacket collar and reminding me that it's there.

But these... these are by far the most comfortable earbuds I've ever worn. Right out of the box they fit my ears perfectly, and if they didn't I'd still have two other sets of in-ear gels to choose from.

BOSE recommends that you install their Connect app on the phone that you're pairing their earbuds with, which isn't at all a necessity—maybe when there's a firmware update to install, but otherwise no. Pairing them to my Android phone was as easy as any other Bluetooth device, and the connection has been rock solid ever since.

Sound quality is on par with any other BOSE earbud or headphone, which is to say excellent. Keep in mind, though, that I'm most often listening to mono podcasts rather than stereo music.

With their charging case BOSE seems to have solved the problem of battery anxiety. No one wants to head out on a two-hour run only to have their wireless earbuds die halfway through. These earbuds are primed for 5 hours of battery life, and their charging case is good for an additional two charging cycles. I usually go out for about an hour at a time, and find myself putting the buds back in the case as soon as I get back. The button that opens the case can also indicate the charge; pressing it lights up a row of LED lights immediately below. And if you put one bud into your right ear you'll hear a voice telling you your battery level the moment you remove the left bud from the case. Clever!

These particular wireless earbuds aren't cheap; in Canada and the United States they retail for $250 USD and $330 CAD respectively. But for comfort, sound quality and ease of use they've so far been worth it.